You remember Jacob’s Ladder, right? Though on the surface a prime example of the “pretty good, not entirely great” ’90s studio thriller, Adrian Lyne‘s movie is both a subversively angry and sad comment upon the American government’s two-pronged failure to protect young men from the immediate effects and fallout of combat. (If you have not seen it and, amazingly, managed to avoid the twist all this time, that’s as far as I’ll go.)
So, maybe there’s something cynically fitting about a remake — those who do not know history, etc. This nevertheless surprising news comes from THR, wherein it’s said that LD Entertainment and producers Michael Gaeta & Alison Rosenzweig (Fright Night, a developing Angel Heart remake) are backing a project that will be scripted by Jeff Buhler (Midnight Mean Train). Because the original happens to be so directly connected to the Vietnam War, this new Jacob’s Ladder will “contemporize the story with new situations and characters,” in their shift creating an homage that has similar existential matters at hand.
Or, they promise to. It’s far too often that the producer of a remake will say “we’re adapting the original text” as a means of throwing off the scent — because when someone says they’re not replicating a movie you love purely for their personal financial gain, guards go down (e.g. Total Recall). A Jacob’s Ladder remake is not at all something which feels needed or necessary, yes, but if they can update it to tackle issues of the War on Terror — even the first Gulf War, from which we have the same temporal distance as Lyne‘s movie did Vietnam — it could be worth a try.
What do you think of a Jacob’s Ladder remake, and how it’s been laid out?